YouTube Adds Storyboard Feature to Videos

YouTube has introduced a new version of its video player, which will enable users to hover a mouse on any point of the video’s timeline and view thumbnail images of specific frames.

Currently videos on YouTube generate three thumbnail images to represent a video. These are captured using the frames at the quarter, half, and three-quarter points in a video. This update will give videos 100 thumbnails arranged in a 10×10 storyboard grid.

As a user hovers his or her mouse across different parts of a video, the new player will pull in thumbnails from the storyboard, which will help him or her skip to specific parts of the video without skipping ahead. Once the timeline is clicked, the video will skip ahead or move back to the desired frame.

The storyboard feature could be helpful during tutorials – it would allow a user to skip to the part in which he or she is experiencing an issue – or perhaps your marketing team would like to skip to the part of the video in which your brand’s product or service is mentioned.

This feature – which was first spotted by Digital Inspiration – is currently being rolled out to users, but YouTube hasn’t revealed when it will be standard for every video.

Jennifer Beese: Jennifer Beese has worked as a community manager and social media strategist. When she’s not writing, you can find her studying anatomy and physiology—she literally has a skeleton in her closet—or under the stars with her telescope.